Improv Class 6 – 8 June 2010

Story was the focus of last night’s class. We started the class with a word association game call Todododo. We struggled with the game because everyone was still up in their heads so we first did the “what I need to say to be fully present” exercise. We also did a relaxation exercise. Being more present and relaxed made Todododo much better.

After that we played a Word association game. This game illustrated how our minds automatically make links between random words. In the next game everyone paired up with one other person. The one had to come up with 4 unrelated sentences that the other had to connect together to create a story. Relating random events together is what makes a story.

Then we played Automatic Story. In this game one player has to ask yes/no questions about the storyline of an unknown story that the other player has in mind. What the questioning player doesn’t know is that the person answering the questions is only saying yes to questions starting with a vowel and no to questions starting with a consonant. The person asking the questions is therefore making up the story without knowing it. This game illustrates how easy it is to make up our own stories. Isn’t it interesting how in life we also often think that someone else is in control of our stories, while we are actually the authors of our own life stories?

The next game that we played was what happens next? In this game Franz was an old man whose hip broke in 7 places and then he was healed by a Native American who let him smoke his peace pipe. Nolan and Minki where 2 Xhosa woman and Minki didn’t want Nolan to visit her home town where there was a big event happening. The routine of the story was broken when Nolan blew up a giant balloon from the gum that fell out of Minki’s grocery bags. Luci then reincorporated the town where the big event was happening by letting Nolan fly there with the balloon.

Key concepts:

Reincorporation: Recycling or re-using ideas or situations from earlier in the story.
Platform: The who, what and where of a scene. Success of a scene often depends on a solid and clear platform.

Breaking routine: Interesting twitch to advance a scene, or to cause status change.